Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes in favor of new programming languages given the difficulty of upgrading existing, popular languages. 'Whenever a new programming language is announced, a certain segment of the developer population always rolls its eyes and groans that we have quite enough to choose from already,' McAllister writes. 'But once a language reaches a certain tipping point of popularity, overhauling it to include support for new features, paradigms, and patterns is easier said than done.' PHP 6, Perl 6, Python 3, ECMAScript 4 -- 'the lesson from all of these examples is clear: Programming languages move slowly, and the more popular a language is, the slower it moves. It is far, far easier to create a new language from whole cloth than it is to convince the existing user base of a popular language to accept radical changes.'

When you have poorly designed software that's in a constant state of maintenance, you can reach a point where maintaining it and dealing with the poor design is no longer the best option[q]

Well I think that comes under core design changes ... such as what happened with Win9x vs WinNT.

[q]The people who are saying that a rewrite is never a good choice and believe that there are never any circumstances which call for it, are completely nuts. They're either not coders, not good coders, never had to deal with resource management, or aren't good at it

I not saying "NEVER EVER EVER" rewrite ... but in the vast number of cases I think it is better just to get the original requirements (if any) or map the behaviours and rewrite that particular module (i.e. Method in OOP) from scratch.

Taking a position on whether to rewrite/maintain code can be a precarious decision

Any objections to the following exception: All applications written as a visual basic 6 VBDs must be rewritten at all costs.

I have a client still maintaining VBDs for their client. The code is in a terrible spaghetti-like mess, typical of VBDs. The problem is, they don't want to revel how bad the code is since they wrote it.